


there is nothing I won't dare

by recoveringrabbit



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, Framework! Fitz, speculation fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-10
Updated: 2017-04-10
Packaged: 2018-10-17 09:54:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10591602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/recoveringrabbit/pseuds/recoveringrabbit
Summary: In which Jemma's last ditch effort is inevitable.[a Framework spec fic]





	

“You’re supposed to be dead,” he says.

He could say it coldly, mechanically, like it’s a mere fact he has no personal feeling about. He could say it angrily, like it’s an irritation or an abomination that she’s managed to escape every single attempt on her life the Framework has thrown at her. He could say it bitterly, considering she’s got a gun trained on him.

He doesn’t.

She takes in his furrowed eyebrows, the way his mouth hangs open just a touch, and for the first time since she burst out of the ground into this hell a tiny spark of hope joins her blazing determination. She has come to drag the Doctor out by force if she must, but she sees her Fitz beneath the sharp suit and empty eyes, and even though time is running out she will be as careful as she can. “I should,” she agrees. “Of an alien virus or at the bottom of the ocean or stranded on a planet on the other side of the universe or flattened by the 112 bus that one time at SciOps. But you saved me. You always do.”

If anything, his confusion deepens. “I’ve been trying my bloody best to kill you.”

“No,” she says. “That’s programming, it’s all fake. You would never try to kill me. You’ve tried, more than once, to die for me instead.”

“Impossible,” he says, all a thin layer of bravado that barely covers the insecurity underneath. “I’d remember something like that.”

She can’t help but laugh. “You’d think, wouldn’t you? Don’t worry, the files are all still there. You will remember, just as soon as you get out of here.”

“Out of where?” he asks, gesturing at the wide white lab around them. “Going into the corridor won’t suddenly give me memories of things that didn’t happen.”

The reminder strikes her in the chest, and she sucks in a slow breath to keep her hands and voice steady. “Going into the corridor will give you memories of things that _did_ happen. This world is falling to pieces, Fitz, but right outside that door another one, the _real_ one, is waiting for us to rejoin it. I know it sounds mad but you have to believe me.”

“Why do I have to believe you?”

“If you don’t, you’ll die.”

He clearly thinks it’s semantics, that she’s overstating her case for rhetorical effect, but she is deadly serious. Everyone else is out, she doesn’t know how or where, but she can see with her own eyes the way the edges of the program are slowly collapsing in around them. She barely made it here before Washington, D.C. disappeared from around the Triskelion. She doesn’t know how much is left outside this room. No Framework to live in; their bodies wasting away on gurneys somewhere—everything has come to this moment, this place. Somehow, she thinks fleetingly, it _always_ comes to this: her and Fitz in a room with death at the door. This will not be the day they don’t escape.

“And that’s a problem for you.” His eyebrows jump, amused. “Yet you’ve got a gun on me. It seems far more likely that I’ll die either way.”

“No,” she says, “no. You would never kill me and I would never, _never_ kill you.”

She shoves away the memory of his face blank and empty beneath her. That was even less him than this version standing in front of her, and this is hardly Fitz at all.

“Forgive me if I find that a little hard to believe.”

She will forgive him anything. At least, she will forgive Fitz anything, and the longer she stands here the more she believes that her only hope of escape is to love him back into reality. Her Fitz is in there someplace. She will chip away at this horrible veneer until the true man is revealed. Even so, her hand shakes as she deliberately sets her gun on the ground and kicks it into the corner of the room. His eyes track the motion out of curiosity more than anything else.

She raises her chin.

“Now, you could go for the gun and kill me, like you’ve been trying to do. But you won’t.”

“Who says?” he retorts, and it sounds so much like her old lab partner she wishes she could laugh.

“Jemma Simmons. Biochemist. Devoted Daughter, Loving Friend—at least that’s what it says on my tombstone. Doctor twice over. Recently Special Advisor to the Director in Science and Technology. Head of SHIELD’s Science and Technology alongside the most brilliant mind I’ve ever known. But do you know what title makes me happiest?”

“What?” he asks, doing a poor job of pretending he doesn’t care.

“Fitz’s girlfriend.”

He grows still, pressing his lips into a thin line, and she can’t help herself, but the dam has been breeched and a rush of words comes pouring out of her in a flood that threatens to drown them both. “I always hated that phrasing before—I never wanted to be anybody’s anything, only myself. But being his makes me more myself, my best self. And if I’m his, he’s mine, and that’s _tremendous_. He trusts me with his heart, and Fitz, _my_ Fitz, his heart is extraordinary. It’s the most important honor I’ve ever had. I wouldn’t trade being his girlfriend for anything.”

Except one thing. But this still isn’t Fitz, and he doesn’t get to know that.

He lets a minute pass, slowly drawing one finger along the edge of the countertop. Her internal clock ticks closer and closer to the alarm, but she doesn’t hurry him. She knows his thinking face.

“You think,” he says finally, “that I’m your Fitz, reprogrammed. If I go with you into your ‘real world’, you’ll get him back. What will happen to me?”

“Nothing,” she shrugs. “You aren’t real, except in his mind, and I hope he forgets about you entirely. I don’t think he will, but never mind. We’ll get through that together, too.”

He nods, corners of his mouth tucked tightly back. “And if I don’t go with you. What happens to you?”

The answer appears on her tongue like an inevitability. Of course it does. If she has learned anything, its that the base code of her programming is Leopold Fitz. “Nothing,” she shrugs, the quaver in her voice belying her attempted nonchalance. “I’ll stay here with you until—well, until something happens.”

“Even though this world is falling down around us,” he says.

She nods, not trusting her voice.

“Why?”

Because without Fitz her world is already in shambles. Because she couldn’t live if he didn’t, isn’t strong enough to exist in a world where he doesn’t. Because in the end she is superstitious, and wants to give their energy a fighting chance to be together for the next hundred billion years.

She doesn’t say that. If this is the last of Fitz she’ll ever get, she wants to remember them happy. So instead she says, “Because we promised we wouldn’t let anything tear us apart again, and I won’t let it.”

She lets her eyes drift closed—just for a moment, just enough to remember the way he smiled when he promised the same, just enough to remember what his hand felt like in hers—

And then she realizes that her hand _is_ in his. Her eyes fly open and he is suddenly so close, this strange man who isn’t Fitz but no longer looks quite so dead, looks quite a bit like Fitz waking up in the morning—

“I don’t understand it,” he says, “but I’ll follow you. I think I’d follow you anywhere.” The corner of his mouth tugs up, a perfect match to her memory. “Even to a different world.”

“The thing is,” she says, tucking her fingers between his, relishing the calluses as she tugs him impatiently toward their future, “you already have. It was my turn to save you.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> I do realise there's a bit of Wrinkle In Time here. I am not above stealing from a master.


End file.
